With its modest confines and compromised winter hours, you could be forgiven for sloshing briskly past the Sylvia Kania Gallery this time of year. But while we're all waiting for winter to end, it's worth a visit to see how these inspired local artists pass the time. In turns fleshy, aromatic, gooey, and wistful, the gallery's exhibition "It's a Matter of Time" collects four young artists in radically different processes of appropriating temporality and the passing of the hours.

To prepare "Somme Nous les Jouets du Destin," an interactive installation by gallery director Jessica Lauren Lipton, more than 300 cups of tea were served at a gallery reception in mid-February. Now, far fewer remain; the couple dozen that do sit in disarray along two wooden shelves. The exhibition is the third of a four-part study in, using Lipton's term, "obsessive tendencies," although the process of leaving several cups of tea to rot is a passive obsession indeed. Lipton (er, no relation) succeeds in evoking the sensation of a party long since past. Predictably, the teabags have begun to mold over. The smell of orange pekoe, a popular choice here, mixes with a fetid rank.

Whether fibrous, viscous, or constantly moving, the bodies of work prepared by Blake Hiltunen add a living quality to the exhibition, integrating time as a working concept rather than a topic of study. This is most clearly present in "Fountain," a mechanical installation where black ink streams down the face of a raw canvas (framed and mounted on sheet rock) and collects into a reservoir below, where a pump cycles it back again. The tiny Victorian frame in "Mirror Relic" is so corroded with calcium carbonate that it resembles a coral trophy, its white, mossy fields forming fractals over the glass, while "Attrition (Interior) II," a sinewy tower of vitreous black resin mounted on a pedestal, accomplishes a similar sensation of decay.

Hiltunen's wax works are as impressive as they are grotesque. In "For God and Glory" (many of his pieces have similarly epic titles), a fount of reddish, petroleum-based wax protrudes from a seemingly floating, eye-level wooden frame and collects in a solidified puddle on the floor. Installed in the middle of the room and human-sized, the piece has an overwhelming presence: a wax statue wearing a frame as its crown. In "Under Her Majesty's Summer Gown," an ornate canvas and wood frame is swamped in a thick beeswax mould. Behind it, a curtain of yellow wax collects in vertical folds, forming pockets of shadows. As in "For God and Glory," the wax recalls Joseph Beuys's seminal work with animal fat, and comes charged with a slightly sexualized physicality.

Audacious or monstrous though they may be, Hiltunen's visual works are particularly interesting for being self-contained. The exhibition's theme can be evoked by envisioning the slow, methodical process required to craft each piece, but essentially, his visual works are not grouped by a particular concept. And while his titles seem prodigious, they seem to remove some of the gravity from the pieces themselves, helping them to stand refreshingly on their own.

Mirthful morbidity Greenville painter Greg Stones writes that he sketches a basic landscape or figure study, "then I try to think of what would make the painting especially awesome. Penguins, zombies, and nudes are invariably the answer."

Alternative universe In the 1930s and '40s, Boston painters developed a moody, mythic realism. They mixed social satire with depictions of street scenes, Biblical scenes, and mystical symbolic narratives, all of it darkened by the shadow of the Great Depression and World War II.

Power plays Some weeks back, I got to listen to Brown University archæology professor Stephen Houston pronounce the throaty, staccato sounds of Maya hieroglyphs carved across a six-foot-wide limestone panel.

Review: The Addison Gallery returns Closed for two years of renovation and expansion, the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy reopened this past Tuesday with "Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Addison Anew," nearly 400 greatest hits from its great collection.

Traveling critic seeks art to review In “60 wrd/min art critic,” a performance event that has the feel of a triathlon, Lori Waxman, the Chicago Tribune art reviewer, will be coming to Portland to write short reviews for artists who wish to show her their work and get a piece written about it.

UNMASKING AFRICAN RELICS | February 26, 2014 An evocative, transportive exhibit of icons, artifacts, and spirit masks from some of the many, many cultures and “kingdoms” of West Africa, what is now Cameroon and Nigeria.

THE TEQUILA ODYSSEY | February 20, 2014 Each of the city’s drinking establishments has its roots in some primordial myth.

TRUE EFFIN' ARTISTRY | February 20, 2014 Mousa is the new recording alias of Vince Nez, a/k/a Aleric Nez, the name by which he released a nimble, unpredictable record in late 2010.

THE STATE OF SEA SALT | February 12, 2014 A surfeit of salt manufacturers have cropped up in the state over the last few years.

NOT YOUR AUNTIE'S DOOM | February 06, 2014 Sure, it may be Latin for “forest of trees,” but Sylvia more readily conjures some wiseacre aunt, not a burly group of veteran musicians trying to carve new notches in well-trod forms of heavy metal.